"A young man dancing, swiveling his hips. He has dark hair, short and slicked up a bit. He wears an unbuttoned band-collared jacket over a shirt with bold black-and-white horizontal stripes. Behind him, on either side, are a pair of barred frames, like prison doors."

Sasha Hathaway, 1

On the morning of September 10, Sasha Hathaway woke up with blood in her mouth.

She was thirteen years and three months old and, even though she lived across the street from me, there was a lot I didn’t know about her. I did not know what she wanted to be when she grew up. I did not know which boy had kissed her at the last church youth party. I did not know what she thought of me or why I couldn’t keep my eyes off her or why she smelled like a vanilla cake all day—even after gym class. Her powers were immense.

Here is what I did know: The boy she kissed was not Billy Costers—who she had a crush on. Her favorite game was Uno and her favorite night was taco night. Her mother had left six months ago, without a goodbye. She said 'my life is over' all the time, whenever something went wrong, whenever she got a C. And I know for certain that when she woke up that morning with her mouth full of blood she didn't realize her life really might be over soon.

"I tasted something funny," she said, wrinkling her nose that morning on the way to school. "Kinda bitter. I thought I was still dreaming. But then I sat up. It spilled out of my mouth all over my pajamas and my sheets."

I wasn’t paying that much attention, I was thinking about her lips, how they seemed like they were made out of cotton and down, the stuff of bonnets and blankets, how they seemed like the softest, most delicate things imaginable, how if I could just find the nerve, just reach out and…

She spit on the sidewalk and wiped her chin with the back of hand.

I’d never seen her do anything so rude and it surprised me. "Totally gross," she said and I nodded at her. "No," she said, seeing my shocked face. She pointed at a wet red stain on the pavement. "Andy, it's still happening."

I spent the day at my desk, staring at her back—thinking about her hair, pulled back behind a headband, still the longest, prettiest hair of anyone in school, like a waterfall of ink spilling from her scalp—while she stared at Billy Costers. She seemed uncomfortable in class all day, holding a napkin to her mouth and taking frequent trips to the bathroom, but she didn’t mention the blood again.

We walked home silently after school. Her dad was waiting for her at the front door when we got home, holding the bloody pajamas in his hand. He had a worried look on his face, under the scruffy beard he started growing after Sasha’s mom left but before he was laid-off from the factory. He mostly sat around the house in plaid shirts and read conspiracy theories on the internet.

“Go home, Andy,” he said to me. He turned to Sasha, clutching the blood-stained cloth in his fist. “Is it woman problems?”

“Oh god,” said Sasha, turning bright red. “My life is over.”

“You can tell me if it is. Maybe it’s time we talking about … you know, birds. Things adults do. We can go to the lady doctor.”

“Andy,” said Sasha, without turning to me. “Go home.”

This would make great flap copy for a novel that has not yet been written: "Little fish spread their wings, pets on hormones, and the modern art detectives."

write a story about failed attempts at utopia. maybe seperate them by age, but link them by theme: the shakers, the 1960s, today.

"we're like those uncharted continents in the sky, clouds passing before the sun. we are vast and unknowable, billowing in many directions at once, capable of either drifting peacefully or exploding into great fits of grey violence. but in the end we are only mist, molecules of water that happen briefly and coincidentally to exist in the same place at the same time—but not forever. we are only mist, capable of being pulled apart, capable of disappearing completely in the face of the wrong gust of wind or the slightest change in pressure. and yes, sometimes we do get to bathe in that bright warm sun but other times, we cover it up completely."

wandering through the night while bodies disintegrate.

"The Great American Memory Hole"

"We all went to bed that night in the same world in which we had woken up."

The Zookeeper's Daughter, 2

June 14, evening.
Edie was knocking on my door. She was dressed in jean shorts and a tight blue shirt that was unbuttoned a little too low. The skin of her chest was empty and soft like the underside of her arms. There was a hint of blush on her, a dash of red blood swirling behind her little cheeks. Eyeliner was driven in a perfect line across her lids but her lipstick was smudged.

“I need meat,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Can I borrow some money?”

"Didn't your parents leave you any?"

"They're not dead yet."

"No, I meant while they're away."

"Yeah but I'm almost out and I need food. A lot of food. I'm really hungry. You wouldn't believe how hungry I am. I could eat a horse, or elk. I could eat an ostrich. I am so hungry right now."

"I can make you something if you want. Sandwich? Linguini?"

"That's really nice but a $50 bill would be nicer.”

“And what do I get in return?”

She smiled, leaning on the doorframe. “Anything you want,” she said.

“Your lipstick is smudged,” I said.

“Shit. Where’s the bathroom?” She pushed past me into the house and disappeared around a corner. When she came back out, she lifted her glasses to the crown of her head and batted her eyelashes up at me. Her lipstick was perfect, her shirt was unbuttoned even lower.

“So what do I have to do to get some money?” she said.

“Did you just unbutton the top of your shirt?” I asked.

“No.” She took a step towards me. “I really need that meat,” she said.

“But its unbuttoned,” I said. I took a step back. “I can see your sternum.” She giggled a little in a way that seemed like it was supposed to come off sexy and innocent at the same time, but was just fake instead.

“Are you hitting on me?” she said, taking another slow step.

“Are you not wearing a bra?”

“Of course not.” She touched my arm.

“This is getting weird,” I said.

“You’re telling me.”

I handed her a $50 bill.

June 16, sometime before dawn.
There was a scream in the night, a roar that shook the windows like the breath of some dread monster shuddering down the darkened streets. I looked out the window—trying to catch sight of anything that could have made that paralyzing sound—but the street was blank and empty.

A light blinked on in the Owens house across the street, then turned off just as quickly, leaving the neighborhood suddenly bathed in the wet light from the river of stars above, tributaries twisting through the dark.

I left the house, went out to the street. I wondered if I had heard anything at all, if it had been imagined, a figment fluttering across a dream but I could still remember what it sounded like: low, dense and rising, ringed with fangs and sorrow.

I strained my ears hoping to hear anything, to catch some last echo springing back off the houses. Instead I heard movement in the Owens house. The light blinked on again, casting a soft yellow rectangle across the lawn. I ducked close to the garage. A girl’s shadow passed through the rectangle. I could smell something, something thick and wild, bloody almost. It was coming from the garage.

I checked the side door. It was unlocked. The smell inside the garage was rich and dirty. Dark shapes seemed to swing in the gloom. There was a clatter of chains twisting. I blindly searched for the switch. The light turned on to reveal stacks of meat on a tarp, animal carcasses swinging from hooks over pools of blood, waiting to be butchered. Sides of beef, legs of lamb and of pork, streaked with rich veins of fat. What could have been maybe ostrich, maybe elk. What might have been horse. Waiting to be eaten. A large freezer hummed in the corner.

I left the garage and realized that for the first time I could remember the house was silent. Edie’s laugh spilled softly out of the illuminated window, as if to underline the silence.

Looking for God in the Particles

A thousand physicists working together at the National Accelerator Laboratory, draped in lab coats and standing in a dignified line, reported in Paris on Monday that they had not found the "God particle"—yet. But they are beginning to figure out where It is not.

One by one, the physicists in the line offered places where It is not found: in the dripping rocks of caverns underground, said one; in the visible breath emitting from a warm mouth on a sunless winter day, said another; and It most certainly could not be found on a beach at night watching the reflection of the moon play across on the tips of the waves. The scientists as a group, all 1,000 of them nodding their heads in unison, can confirm that the God particle was completely undetectable from a sidewalk on a hill watching the sun rise.

They can say with 95% certainty that Its mass—in the units preferred by physicists—is not in the range between 158 billion and 175 billion electron volts. They can confirm that the Grand Canyon was untouched by the God particle, the Amazon rainforest barren. And even though it is theorized that the particle created the mass for all these things to exist, It was found in none of them.

Over the last decade physicists working on two separate experiments have combed the debris from a thousand trillion collisions of protons and anti-protons looking for signs of this God particle, the Higgs boson, which is said to be responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass. In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, explained how two classes of particles which now appear to be different—energy and mass—were once one and the same. His theory proposed the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things—a speck so important and precious It has come to be known as the "God particle," the particle that set the universe in motion. This imbuing of mass happened in the moments after the Big Bang, as the universe expanded and cooled, and thus eventually led us to the Big Bands of the 1930s. Yet so far no one has been able to find the Higgs boson in the stream of debris emitted when two particles are smashed together at high speeds, or at the top of a mountain above the clouds on a crisp windless day.

Rumors abounded in recent months that God could be found in the fossil record, in shapes left in ancient rock by trilobites and jellyfish, crocodiles and ferns. That It could be found somewhere deep in the human brain, buried under mountains of grey folds and pulsing with electricity. That It could be found in math or language, in music or in dance. And yet the scientists on this small stage in Paris debunked them all.

The new results, combining the data from two separate experiments, narrow the range in which the Higgs, if It exists, must be hiding. Physicists had previously concluded that It must lie somewhere 115 billion and 200 billion electron volts. By comparison, a proton, the anchor of ordinary matter, weighs in at about a billion electron volts. Other previous predications by physicists included that It might lie somewhere between the scales of a fish, or in the air beneath the wings of a falcon, that God could perhaps be found in the darkest, deepest, densest part of the bottom of the bottom of the sea, in a hole somewhere miles below civilization, hidden from the light.

Theories do exist that do not anticipate the God particle at all, described elsewhere as the Higgsless model. Scientists who supposed the Higgsless model explained that perhaps we are free to our own fate, to make our own decisions. Perhaps we are free to indulge our whims and find the embodiment of God, Its very idea, to exist only in ourselves and our desires, to exist in the ecstasy we can generate in our own lives.

But the scientists on the stage in Paris that night refused to believe this existential notion, that we could possibly be alone in this world, unwatched by the Higgs boson or anyone else, unobserved by the heavens. One of them—in the back near the end of the line, outside the illumination of the stage spotlights—chimed up to posit the possible existence of whole families of Higgs bosons, as opposed to a single Higgs particle of the Standard Model—whole families of gods existing together, flocks of angels and cherubs, swarms of demons and imps swimming together in the cosmos, breathing mass into benighted particles. Another scientist mentioned that perhaps there is some kind of Higgs trinity, that perhaps Higgs boson has a son.

Proof of the Higgs boson would provide us with some hope and solace that beauty and unity really do exist—however rare they may seem in our world—at the very foundation of the universe, at the very center and source of all has existed and all that ever will. And so, said the lead scientist downcast, his lab coat drooping nearly to the floor of the stage, the most intensive particle hunt in the history of physics must go on.